The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

79 DAMP Untitled and indefinite DAMP must be one of Australia’s most successful artist collaborations, even if measured only by its longevity. Established by graduates of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts in 1995, it has involved 74 members since its inception. Although some inaugural members remain, it has resisted being tied to a specific identity or agenda. If it may be characterised at all, DAMP is known for its playfully provocative actions, and projects that revel in the expansion of art’s parameters, particularly where the division between artist and audience is blurred. DAMP describes its works as ‘social sculptures’. With Untitled 2009, for APT6, DAMP revisits an earlier work into which new elements have been introduced, reflecting the group’s own changing form. Untitled 2007, an oversized plinth crowned with a circle of ill-matched chairs, was presented at Uplands Gallery in Melbourne. Conventionally, what sits atop a plinth is understood to be art, but DAMP’s weekly meetings took place on top of the structure, implying that the collaboration was its own art form. This gesture was deliberately compromised, however, as the space between the plinth and the ceiling was too cramped for anyone to stand upright. While Untitled 2007 took the form of the very thing that isolates an art object from the rest of the world, DAMP imagined this plinth as a conduit rather than a demarcation. When visitors climbed the structure’s internal steps to peer out of the manhole at the top, they found themselves in the middle of the group. This work, and DAMP’s practice in general, exemplifies theorist Nicolas Bourriaud’s proposition that art is a state of encounter. 1 DAMP often invites the audience to participate, either by contributing text or ideas, or by taking up weapons to destroy its works. Authorship dissipates among the members and beyond to its viewers in a boundless exchange between individuals. To reconfigure Untitled for the Gallery of Modern Art requires an impressive amplification of scale. Just as plinths are sized to fit the art they support, this one must be raised to over five metres in height in order to occupy the vast space in which it sits. For the duration of the exhibition, DAMP makes the space above the plinth available for local groups of various kinds to hold their own meetings. The context of APT6 also puts DAMP in dialogue with collaborations from the Asia Pacific region, one of the threads running through this year’s exhibition. The interior of the original work proved a popular hideaway for children at the exhibition opening in 2007, which has prompted DAMP to extend the new version to include a ‘rec room’ or cubbyhouse inside. Cubbies exist in collective memory or imagination as autonomous sites away from adults. DAMP secretes its cubby inside a plinth inside a gallery — right under the paternal nose of art — and invites the audience into this space, into the zone between art and everything else. Here, visitors encounter paraphernalia from the DAMP studio, an old couch where they can sit and relax, and a visitors’ book in which to leave responses and comments. A self-negating monument, Untitled 2009 gives form to the idea that art is not necessarily found in galleries or on plinths, nor is it located in unique objects. Pointing to a conventional eschewal of references outside of art, its classic modernist title, ‘Untitled’, instead opens a portal onto endless possibilities. Francis E Parker Endnote 1 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics , trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2002, p.18.